Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
"Honest site owners often worry about duplicate content when they don't really have to," Google's Cutts said. "There are also people that are a little less conscientious." He also noted that different top level domains, like x.com, x.ca, are not a concern."
The argument that a duplicate-content filter will "eliminate whole industries" simply isn't true.
Agree. Besides such kind of sites probably will never be eliminated from the local search results because people need the information about the nearby stores with the nails.
So the informational may be duplicate on the global level and unique on the local level.
It would be interesting to compare the SERP for the sites that sell common type of widgets for local and global searches. Might be Google has already implemented it.
Vadim.
Banner text, side columns and footer text for those websites using template construction have duplicate content running right through them.
But because the main content of each page has it's keywords optimised with the meta tags, <h1> tags, keyword density, image <alt> tags etc etc for that particular page - then the page ranks well for the optimised content.
So, if it's duplicate content that isn't optimised, then it's not going to appear high in the SERPS anyway - right?
Honest site owners often worry about duplicate content when they don't really have to,... He also noted that different top level domains, like x.com, x.ca, are not a concern.
A European multinational company I know has unknowingly built near copies of their site in about a dozen ccTLDs. About 5% of each site is unique. Only the .com shows a reasonable number of indexed pages with the site: command. A couple show 2-3 results; the rest including the head office show zero results and are whitebarred. I'd say that this "honest" un-SEOd company needs to worry big time.
How many hours are spent on this subject?
If you want to know the answer why not simply try it out?
Create a few domains, post some duplicate content, set up identical links to those pages and see what happens!
It isn't rocket science, it will cost you the price of a meal, and a few hours of time.......then you will know the definitive answer!
Alternatively you could simply do a few hundred searches for "odd ball things" are you will come to the same conclusion.
I've watched competitors make grave errors using different top level domains where they shared some content.
Different top level domains are most certainly a concern.
I have a competitor that has 4 mirrors living happily in Google despite a number of spam reports.
.com.au
.net.au
.com
.net
and one other all indexed in Google
In one search they appear 4 in a row taking up the first 4 places.
Different top level domains: if you own a .com and a.fr, for example, don’t worry about dupe content in this case
Don’t know why he says that as it goes in direct contrast to what is posted on the Google guidelines (I have bolded the most relevant sentence)
“While all sites in our index return for searches restricted to "the web," we draw on a relevant subset of sites for each country restrict. Our crawlers may identify the country for a site by factors such as the physical location at which the site is hosted, the site's IP address, the WHOIS information for a domain, and its top-level domain.
That said, your site's top-level domain doesn't need to match the country domain for which you'd like it to return. It's also important to keep in mind that our crawlers don't index duplicate content, so creating identical sites at several domains will likely not result in their returning for many country restricts. If you do create duplicate domains, we suggest using a robots.txt file to block our crawler from accessing all but your preferred one.”
[google.com...]
Can anyone explain?
1.IP and location do matter but there are other factors also (for example the language and links) and they may overweight.
2.There are no punishment for the duplicate content but only content of one site will survive. If the sites in both countries have both languages, it is better to restrict some pages with robots.txt
3.etc. (read this forum long time:)
Vadim.
Don’t know why he says that as it goes in direct contrast to what is posted on the Google guidelines (I have bolded the most relevant sentence)
Obviously they adopted a policy where e.g. an international business would be indexed for both or more (near) duplicate contents in different domains.
For example if an user from UK does the search, the company's .co.uk would have preference before .com version. I see it as pretty fair.
It is unclear however (and I think this is the case), if the second level domain must be the same for such policy to work.
Anyway, I have never seen a big problem with duplicate content issue.
As webdoctor put it in the message #2, there is no "penalty". If you have two or more (nearly) identical pages of YOUR content, only one is being indexed.
Nothing wrong with that.
However, if you use templates, affiliate products, articles from other sites and such, it is a natural tendency of a well designed search engine to try to find the original owner of the content and give him the preference/credits.
Nothing wrong with this either.
Its not doing this for the search users benefit because it could just simply display in the serps the most relevent page of a site every time applicable to that search query - end of problem.
It does it imo because it wants to stop webmasters from ranking for multi variations of similar keywords so that they have to buy adwords its that simple.
For example if your site is an authority on "Blue widgets" you would think it would rank for "Your blue widgets", "my blue widgets", "everyones blue widget" "Blue widgeters" etc, etc, etc. It you purchased adwords for that keyword it would feature on all the similar keyword searches.
Fact is that unless your blue widget site has a page page optimised for "everyones blue widget" it is unlikely to rank anywhere for it - the moment you add a page thats similar but optimised to the adjusted keyword its a matter of time untill google treats it as duplicate.
All in all, i think google is now spending far to much effort trying to work out ways to prevent webmasters sites ranking for multi keywords in its quest to increase earnings.
As i posted, all google needs to do is deliver in its serps "The most relevent page" on a site applicable to that search term. so called duplicate content on a site where honest webmasters get stuffed by google would then not be an issue.
Don’t know why he says that as it goes in direct contrast to what is posted on the Google guidelines
When Matt says:
Different top level domains: if you own a .com and a.fr, for example, don’t worry about dupe content in this case
He is not saying that all pages from all domains are going to get equal ranking. He's saying that you don't have to worry about being penalized for the same content on multiple domains. What Google does is try to show the best URL in their listings, once. It is not a penalty to have the other copies on other domains appear much lower.
This is the real definition of canonicalization. Most webmasters consider cononicalization a www/non-www issue, but it's really a dupe content issue, and this is what the engineers are hoping to improve on after the infrastructure changes going on with Big Daddy.
The ultimate SE spam is coming. "original content spam". That will be a tough one for the SE algorythms to fight.
heh, then they will go back to links only.
chicken in the egg, huh? ;)
He is not saying that all pages from all domains are going to get equal ranking. He's saying that you don't have to worry about being penalized for the same content on multiple domains. What Google does is try to show the best URL in their listings, once. It is not a penalty to have the other copies on other domains appear much lower.
I don't think this was a good explanation.
If you look at White's post, there are two, at the first sight, contradictory statements:
1. "Different top level domains: if you own a .com and a.fr, for example, don’t worry about dupe content in this case."
2. "It's also important to keep in mind that our crawlers don't index duplicate content, so creating identical sites at several domains will likely not result in their returning for many country restricts."
IMO, the only satisactory explanation is, in short, this one:
1-a: If your own widgetcompany.com & widgetcompany.co.uk with identical content = no filter
1-b: If your own widgetcompany.com & widgetcorporation.fr in different languages = original content on both sites = no filter
2. If your own widgetcompany.com & widgetcorporation.co.uk with identical content = identical pages from one site filtered (not indexed)
Fact is that unless your blue widget site has a page page optimised for "everyones blue widget" it is unlikely to rank anywhere for it - the moment you add a page thats similar but optimised to the adjusted keyword its a matter of time untill google treats it as duplicate. >
Funny you should say that - on my pages where I removed the title page tagline 'from company name', the pages still rank - the ones with tagline intact have now gone supplemental. I don't know if it is an intended effect or not, but that's what happened.
When you look at the Serps now on a datacentew comparison, lots of site at the top now just have widgets as a title. I don't like it personally - all the listings look the same. I like it even less that those tagline pages have gone supplemental. :(
Don’t know why he says that as it goes in direct contrast to what is posted on the Google guidelines
Time may be one of the explanations.
If I recall correct, Matt Cutts mentioned that webmasters guidelines were slightly obsolete. He probably did not mean that they are not correct, simply algorithm is changing continuously and some accents or weights may change with time.
Vadim.
I say consider Supplemental Results a penalty and fix it by adding more content to the page if the page is too short or rewriting it. I've seen pages recuperate with this method.
All my supplemental pages are effectively 'frozen' - they haven't been fresh-cached for nearly a year.
It is a major flaw in the algorithm when a quality, honest site gets dinged in favor of less relevant results due to incorrectly perceived duplicate content penalties
Nicely put. It's actually also arguably a flaw if a "low quality" or even DISHONEST site with more relevant content for a particular query is taken out. I hope Google spends it's time worrying about serving relevance rather than following "extremism in the defense of the algorithm" which has led to a LOT of collateral damage - I'd estimate that for at least half the highly competitive phrases the "best site" (if it was defined by a huge user panel) is no longer served and I think it's starting to hurt Google as people look to vertical rather than full web search tools.
The cached data is from 2004
That's a situation I'm seeing more of, inless i previously missed it. We have many frozen pages cached at Nov 2004 delivering fresh content every day.
Does your site have consistant original content? and were you the first to release it?
